The word Siddhaṃ means "accomplished" or "perfected" in Sanskrit. The script received its name from the practice of writing Siddhaṃ, or Siddhaṃ astu (may there be perfection), at the head of documents. Other names for the script include bonji (Japanese: 梵字) lit. "Brahma's characters" and "Sanskrit script" and Chinese: 悉曇文字; pinyin: Xītán wénzi lit. "Siddhaṃ script".

Siddhaṃ is an abugida rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable, but it does not include every possible syllable. If no other mark occurs, the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, anusvara, and visarga. A virama can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel, which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words.

Many Buddhist texts taken to China along the Silk Road were written using a version of the Siddhaṃ script. This continued to evolve, and minor variations are seen across time, and in different regions. Importantly it was used for transmitting the Buddhist tantra texts. At the time it was considered important to preserve the pronunciation of mantras, and Chinese was not suitable for writing the sounds of Sanskrit. This led to the retention of the Siddhaṃ script in East Asia. The practice of writing using Siddhaṃ survived in East Asia where Tantric Buddhism persisted.

Kūkai introduced the Siddhaṃ script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda-trained monks including one known as Prajñā (Chinese: 般若三藏; pinyin: Bōrě Sāncáng, 734–c. 810). By the time Kūkai learned this script, the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India had been closed by the expanding Abbasid Caliphate.

In Japan, the writing of mantras and copying/reading of sutras using the Siddhaṃ script is still practiced in the esoteric schools of Shingon Buddhism and Tendai as well as in the syncretic sect of Shugendō. The characters are known as shittan(悉曇) or bonji(梵字, Chinese: Fànzì). The Taishō Tripiṭaka version of the Chinese Buddhist canon preserves the Siddhaṃ characters for most mantras, and Korean Buddhists still write bījas in a modified form of Siddhaṃ. A recent innovation is the writing of Japanese language slogans on T-shirts using Bonji. Japanese Siddhaṃ has evolved from the original script used to write sūtras and is now somewhat different from the ancient script.

It is typical to see Siddhaṃ written with a brush, as with Chinese writing; it is also written with a bamboo pen. In Japan, a special brush called a bokuhitsu(朴筆, Cantonese: pokbat) is used for formal Siddhaṃ calligraphy. The informal style is known as "fude" (筆, Cantonese: "moubat").

In the middle of the 9th century, China experienced a series of purges of "foreign religions", thus cutting Japan off from the sources of Siddhaṃ texts. In time, other scripts, particularly Devanagari, replaced Siddhaṃ in India, while in Bengal, Siddhaṃ evolved to become the Bengali alphabet, leaving East Asia as the only region where Siddhaṃ is still used.

There were special forms of Siddhaṃ used in Korea that varied significantly from those used in China and Japan, and there is evidence that Siddhaṃ was written in Central Asia, as well, by the early 7th century.

As was done with Chinese characters, Japanese Buddhist scholars sometimes created multiple characters with the same phonological value to add meaning to Siddhaṃ characters. This practice, in effect, represents a 'blend' of the Chinese style of writing and the Indian style of writing and allows Sanskrit texts in Siddhaṃ to be differentially interpreted as they are read, as was done with Chinese characters that the Japanese had adopted. This led to multiple variants of the same characters.[5]

With regards to directionality, Siddhaṃ texts were usually read from left-to-right then top-to-bottom, as with Indic languages, but occasionally they were written in the traditional Chinese style, from top-to-bottom then right-to-left. Bilingual Siddhaṃ-Japanese texts show the manuscript turned 90 degrees clockwise and the Japanese is written from top-to-bottom, as is typical of Japanese, and then the manuscript is turned back again, and the Siddhaṃ writing is continued from left-to-right (the resulting Japanese characters look sideways).

Over time, additional markings were developed, including punctuation marks, head marks, repetition marks, end marks, special ligatures to combine conjuncts and rarely to combine syllables, and several ornaments of the scribe's choice, which are not currently encoded. The nuqta is also used in some modern Siddhaṃ texts.

Siddhaṃ is still largely a hand written script. Some efforts have been made to create computer fonts, though to date none of these are capable of reproducing all of the Siddhaṃ conjunct consonants. Notably, the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Texts Association has created a Siddhaṃ font for their electronic version of the Taisho Tripiṭaka, though this does not contain all possible conjuncts. The software Mojikyo also contains fonts for Siddhaṃ, but split Siddhaṃ in different blocks and requires multiple fonts to render a single document.

A Siddhaṃ input system which relies on the CBETA font Siddhamkey 3.0 has been produced.

1.
Abugida
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This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional. The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which the symbols cannot be split into separate consonants, abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of South and Southeast Asia, Semitic Ethiopic scripts, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units, abugida as a term in linguistics was proposed by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology of writing systems. Abugidas were long considered to be syllabaries, or intermediate between syllabaries and alphabets, and the term syllabics is retained in the name of Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, other terms that have been used include neosyllabary, pseudo-alphabet, semisyllabary and syllabic alphabet. The formal definitions given by Daniels and Bright for abugida and alphasyllabary differ, some writing systems are abugidas but not alphasyllabaries, an abugida is defined as a type of writing system whose basic characters denotes consonants followed by a particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote other vowels. Bright did not require that an alphabet explicitly represent all vowels, Phagspa is an example of an abugida that is not an alphasyllabary, and modern Lao is an example of an alphasyllabary that is not an abugida, for its vowels are always explicit. This description is expressed in terms of an abugida and this may formally make the system ambiguous, but in practice this is not a problem, for then the interpretation with the never used inherent vowel sound will always be a wrong interpretation. The fundamental principles of an abugida apply to words made up of consonant-vowel syllables, the syllables are written as a linear sequences of the units of the script. If all modifications are by diacritics and all follow the direction of the writing of the letters. However, most languages have words that are more complicated than a sequence of CV syllables, the first complication is syllables that consist of just a vowel. Now, in languages, this issue does not arise. This is common in Semitic languages and in languages of mainland SE Asia, for some languages, a zero consonant letter is used as though every syllable began with a consonant. For other languages, each vowel has a letter that is used for each syllable consisting of just the vowel. These letters are known as independent vowels, and are found in most Indic scripts and these letters may be quite different to the corresponding diacritics, which by contrast are known as dependent vowels. As a result of the spread of writing systems, independent vowels may be used to represent syllables beginning with a glottal stop, the next two complications are sequences of consonants before a vowel and syllables ending in a consonant. The simplest solution, which is not always available, is to break with the principle of writing words as a sequence of syllables and use a unit representing just a consonant. In a true abugida, the lack of marking may result from the diachronic loss of the inherent vowel

2.
Sanskrit
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Sanskrit is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, a philosophical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and a literary language and lingua franca of ancient and medieval South Asia. As a result of transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia, as one of the oldest Indo-European languages for which substantial written documentation exists, Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. The body of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical, the compositions of Sanskrit were orally transmitted for much of its early history by methods of memorization of exceptional complexity, rigor, and fidelity. Thereafter, variants and derivatives of the Brahmi script came to be used, Sanskrit is today one of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which mandates the Indian government to develop the language. It continues to be used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals and Buddhist practice in the form of hymns. The Sanskrit verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- may be translated as refined, elaborated, as a term for refined or elaborated speech, the adjective appears only in Epic and Classical Sanskrit in the Manusmṛti and the Mahabharata. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the fourth century BCE. Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, evolved out of the earlier Vedic form, the present form of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced back to as early as the second millennium BCE. Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or Pāṇinian Sanskrit as separate dialects, although they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a collection of hymns, incantations and theological and religio-philosophical discussions in the Brahmanas. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, for nearly 2000 years, Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent East Asia. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry—the Ramayana, the deviations from Pāṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or innovations, and not because they are pre-Paninian. Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations ārṣa, meaning of the ṛṣis, in some contexts, there are also more prakritisms than in Classical Sanskrit proper. There were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit, paścimottarī, madhyadeśī, pūrvi, the predecessors of the first three dialects are attested in Vedic Brāhmaṇas, of which the first one was regarded as the purest. In the 2001 Census of India,14,035 Indians reported Sanskrit to be their first language, in India, Sanskrit is among the 14 original languages of the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. The state of Uttarakhand in India has ruled Sanskrit as its official language. In October 2012 social activist Hemant Goswami filed a petition in the Punjab. More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since Indias independence in 1947, much of this work has been judged of high quality, in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages

3.
India
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India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and it is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast, in the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indias Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a border with Thailand. The Indian subcontinent was home to the urban Indus Valley Civilisation of the 3rd millennium BCE, in the following millennium, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism began to be composed. Social stratification, based on caste, emerged in the first millennium BCE, early political consolidations took place under the Maurya and Gupta empires, the later peninsular Middle Kingdoms influenced cultures as far as southeast Asia. In the medieval era, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived, much of the north fell to the Delhi sultanate, the south was united under the Vijayanagara Empire. The economy expanded in the 17th century in the Mughal empire, in the mid-18th century, the subcontinent came under British East India Company rule, and in the mid-19th under British crown rule. A nationalist movement emerged in the late 19th century, which later, under Mahatma Gandhi, was noted for nonviolent resistance, in 2015, the Indian economy was the worlds seventh largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the major economies and is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption, malnutrition, a nuclear weapons state and regional power, it has the third largest standing army in the world and ranks sixth in military expenditure among nations. India is a constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society and is home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats. The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindu, the latter term stems from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which was the historical local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as The people of the Indus, the geographical term Bharat, which is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations. Scholars believe it to be named after the Vedic tribe of Bharatas in the second millennium B. C. E and it is also traditionally associated with the rule of the legendary emperor Bharata. Gaṇarājya is the Sanskrit/Hindi term for republic dating back to the ancient times, hindustan is a Persian name for India dating back to the 3rd century B. C. E. It was introduced into India by the Mughals and widely used since then and its meaning varied, referring to a region that encompassed northern India and Pakistan or India in its entirety

4.
East Asia
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East Asia is the eastern subregion of the Asian continent, which can be defined in either geographical or ethno-cultural terms. Geographically and geopolitically, it includes China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Korea and Japan, it covers about 12,000,000 km2, or about 28% of the Asian continent, the East Asian people comprise more than 1.5 billion people. About 38% of the population of Asia and 22%, or over one fifth, the overall population density of the region is 133 inhabitants per square kilometre, about three times the world average of 45/km2. Historically, societies in East Asia have been part of the Chinese cultural sphere, major religions include Buddhism, Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese folk religion in China and Taiwan, Shinto in Japan, Korean shamanism in Korea. Shamanism is also prevalent among Mongolians and other populations of northern East Asia. The Chinese calendar is the root from which many other East Asian calendars are derived, Chinese Dynasties dominated the region in matters of culture, trade, and exploration as well as militarily for a very long time. There are records of tributes sent overseas from the kingdoms of Korea. There were also considerable levels of cultural and religious exchange between the Chinese and other regional Dynasties and Kingdoms, as connections began to strengthen with the Western world, Chinas power began to diminish. Around the same time, Japan solidified itself as a nation state, throughout World War II, Korea, Taiwan, much of eastern China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam all fell under Japanese control. Culturally, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam are commonly seen as being encompassed by cultural East Asia, there are mixed debates around the world whether these countries or regions should be considered in East Asia or not. Vietnam Siberia in Russia Sovereignty issues exist over some territories in the South China Sea, however, in this context, the term Far East is often more appropriate which covers ASEAN countries and the countries in East Asia. However, being a Eurocentric term, Far East describes the geographical position in relation to Europe rather than its location within Asia. Alternatively, the term Asia Pacific Region is often used in describing East Asia and this usage, which is seen in economic and diplomatic discussions, is at odds with the historical meanings of both East Asia and Northeast Asia. The Council on Foreign Relations defines Northeast Asia as Japan and Korea, the military and economic superpower of China became the largest economy in the world in 2014, surpassing the United States of America. Currently in East Asia, trading systems are open, and zero or low duties on imports of consumer and capital goods etc. have considerably helped stimulate cost-efficiency. Free and flexible labor and other markets are important factors making for high levels of business-economic performance. East Asian populations have demonstrated highly positive work ethics, there are relatively large and fast-growing markets for consumer goods and services of all kinds. The culture of East Asia has been influenced by the civilisation of China, East Asia, as well as Vietnam, share a Confucian ethical philosophy, Buddhism, political and legal structures, and historically a common writing system

5.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word

6.
Gupta script
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The Gupta script was used for writing Sanskrit and is associated with the Gupta Empire of India which was a period of material prosperity and great religious and scientific developments. The Gupta script was descended from Brahmi and gave rise to the Nāgarī, Sharada, the Gupta Script was descended from the Ashokan Brahmi script, and is a crucial link between Brahmi and most other scripts in the Brahmic family of Scripts, a family of alphasyllabaries or abugidas. This means that while only consonantal phonemes have distinct symbols, vowels are marked by diacritics, in fact, the Gupta script works in exactly the same manner as its predecessor and successors, and only the shapes and forms of the graphemes and diacritics are different. Through the 4th century, letters began to take more cursive and symmetric forms, in this sense, the term Gupta script should be taken to mean any form of writing derived from the Gupta period, even though there may be a lack of uniformity in the scripts. The surviving inscriptions of the Gupta script are found on iron or stone pillars. One of the most important was the Allahabad Prasasti, the study of Gupta coins began with the discovery of a hoard of gold coins in 1783. Many other such hoards have since discovered, the most important being the Bayana hoard, discovered in 1946. Many of the Gupta Empire’s coins bear inscriptions of legends or mark historic events, in fact, it was one of the first Indian Empires to do so, probably as a result of its unprecedented prosperity. Almost every Gupta king issued coins, beginning with its first king, moreover, space was more limited especially on their silver coins, and thus many of the symbols are truncated or stunted. Formerly Preserved in the China Ethnic Library

7.
Eastern Nagari script
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Eastern Nagari script or Bengali-Assamese script or BA script defines the unified usage of the Bengali script and the Assamese script through minor variations within them, in various languages. Its usage is associated with the two languages, Bengali and Assamese. Beside these two, this system has, throughout history, been used for languages, such as Bishnupriya Manipuri, Meitei Manipuri. Many other languages like Khasi, Bodo, Karbi, Mising etc. were also written in this system in the past, Eastern Nagari is less blocky and present a more sinuous shaping. Eastern Nagari is derived from the precursor script Siddham, the modern Eastern Nagari script was formalized in 1778 when it was first typeset by Charles Wilkins. The Eastern Nagari script was not associated with any particular regional language. The script was used to write Sanskrit. Epics of Hindu scripture, including the Mahabharata or Ramayana, were written in older versions of the Eastern Nagari script in this region and it was also used by the later Ahom kings to write the Buranjis, the Ahom chronicles, in the Assamese language. There is a legacy of East sub-continental literature written in this script. While efforts at standardizing the script for the Bengali language continue in such notable centers as the Bangla Academy at Dhaka and it is still not quite uniform as yet, as many people continue to use various archaic forms of letters, resulting in concurrent forms for the same sounds. Among the various regional variations within this script, only the Bengali and it seems likely that the standardization of the script will be greatly influenced by the need to typeset it on computers. Work has been underway since around 2001 to develop Unicode fonts, all of these vowel letters are used in both Assamese and Bengali. For example, the script has two symbols for the sound and two symbols for the vowel sound. This redundancy stems from the time when this script was used to write Sanskrit, a language that had a short and a long, and a short and a long. These letters are preserved in the script with their traditional names of short i and long i, vowel signs can be used in conjunction with consonants to modify the pronunciation of the consonant. When no vowel Diacritic symbol is written, then the vowel অ is the default inherited vowel for the consonant, to specifically denote the absence of a vowel, a hôsôntô may be written underneath the consonant. Assamese Consonants Bengali Consonants The names of the consonant letters in Eastern Nagari are typically just the consonants main pronunciation plus the inherent vowel অ ô, since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters names look identical to the letter itself. Some letters that have lost their distinctive pronunciation in Modern Assamese, for example, since the consonant phoneme /n/ can be written ন, ণ, or ঞ, these letters are not simply called nô, instead, they are called dental nô, cerebral nô and niô

8.
Assamese alphabet
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The Assamese script is a writing system of the Assamese language. It used to be the script of choice in the Brahmaputra valley for Sanskrit as well as languages such as Bodo, Khasi. By the 17th century three styles of Assamese script could be identified that converged to the script following typesetting required for printing. The present standard is identical to the Bengali alphabet except for three letters, the Buranjis were written during the Ahom dynasty in the Assamese language using the Assamese alphabet. Later, Sankardev used it in the 15th and 16th centuries to compose his oeuvre in Assamese and Brajavali dialect, the Ahom king Supangmung, was the first ruler who started issuing Assamese coins for his kingdom. A similar script with minor differences is used to write Maithili, Bengali, Meithei, the Umachal rock inscription of the 5th century evidences the first use of a script in the region. The script was similar to the one used in Samudraguptas Allahabad Pillar inscription. Rock and copper plate inscriptions from then onwards, and Xaansi bark manuscripts right up to the 18th–19th centuries show a development of the Assamese script. The script could be said to develop proto-Assamese shapes by the 13th century, the script presently has a total of 11 vowel letters, used to represent the eight main vowel sounds of Assamese, along with a number of vowel diphthongs. All of these are used in both Assamese and Bengali, the two main languages using the script, for example, the Assamese script has two symbols for the vowel sound and two symbols for the vowel sound. This redundancy stems from the time when this script was used to write Sanskrit, a language that had a short and a long, and a short and a long. These letters are preserved in the Assamese script with their traditional names of hôrswô i and dirghô i, vowel signs can be used in conjunction with consonants to modify the pronunciation of the consonant. When no vowel is written, the vowel অ is often assumed, to specifically denote the absence of a vowel, may be written underneath the consonant. The names of the consonant letters in Assamese are typically just the consonants main pronunciation plus the inherent vowel ô, since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters names look identical to the letter itself. Some letters that have lost their distinctive pronunciation in Modern Assamese are called by a more elaborate name. For example, since the consonant phoneme /n/ can be written ন, ণ, or ঞ, these letters are not simply called nô, instead, they are called ন dôntiya nô, ণ murdhôinnya nô, and ঞ niô. Goswami the number of clusters is 143 symbolised by 174 conjunct letters. Three phoneme clusters are 21 in number, which are written by 27 conjunct clusters, a few of them are given hereafter as examples, Though ক্ষ is used in Bengali, it has a different pronunciation

9.
Bengali alphabet
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The Bengali alphabet or Bangla alphabet or Bangali/Bengali script is the writing system for the Bengali language and is the 5th most widely used writing system in the world due to its population. Historically, the script has also used to write Sanskrit in the region of Bengal. From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali script is an abugida, i. e. its vowel graphemes are mainly realised not as independent letters and it is written from left to right and lacks distinct letter cases. It is recognisable, as are other Brahmic scripts, by a horizontal line running along the tops of the letters that links them together which is known as মাত্রা matra. The Bengali script is less blocky and presents a more sinuous shape. The Bengali script evolved from the Kamarupi script, which belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts, Assamese script has an additional character, wô, represented as ৱ, which is absent in the Bengali script. The version of the used for Manipuri is also a different variation, it uses the rô. It also uses the Assamese script character sounding wô, represented as ৱ, the Bengali script was originally not associated with any particular language but was often used in the eastern regions of the Middle kingdoms of India and then in the Pala Empire. It later continued to be used in the Bengal region. It was later standardised into the modern Bengali script by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar under the reign of the East India Company, today, the script holds official script status in Bangladesh and India, and it is associated with the daily life of Bengalis. The Bengali script can be divided into vowel diacritics, consonant and vowel letters, modifiers, digits, the Bengali script has a total of 11 vowel graphemes, each of which is called a স্বরবর্ণ sbôrôbôrnô vowel letter. The sbôrôbôrnôs represent six of the seven vowel sounds of Bengali. All of them are used in both Bengali and Assamese, the two main languages using the script, অ ô /ɔ/ sounds as the default Inherent vowel for the entire Bengali script. As a result, the sound is orthographically realised by multiple means in modern Bengali orthography, usually using some combination of এ, অ, আ, two vowel symbols for the vowel sound and two symbols for the vowel sound. The redundancy stems from the time when this script was used to write Sanskrit, a language that had a short ই and a long ঈ, and a short উ and a long ঊ. The letters are preserved in the Bengali script with their traditional names despite the fact that they are no longer pronounced differently in ordinary speech and these graphemes serve an etymological function, however, in preserving the original Sanskrit spelling in tôtsômô Bengali words. The grapheme called ঋ ri does not really represent a vowel phoneme in Bengali, nevertheless, it is included in the vowel section of the inventory of the Bengali script. This inconsistency is also a remnant from Sanskrit, where the grapheme represents a retroflex approximant, when a vowel sound occurs at the beginning of a syllable or when it follows another vowel, it is written using a distinct letter

10.
Tibetan alphabet
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The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida used to write the Tibetic languages such as Tibetan, as well as Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Ladakhi, and sometimes Balti. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the cursive form used in everyday writing is called umê script. The alphabet is closely linked to a broad ethnic Tibetan identity, spanning across areas in Tibet, Bhutan, India. The Tibetan alphabet is of Indic origin and it is ancestral to the Limbu alphabet, the Lepcha alphabet, the creation of the Tibetan alphabet is attributed to Thonmi Sambhota of the mid-7th century. Tradition holds that Thonmi Sambhota, a minister of Songtsen Gampo, was sent to India to study the art of writing, the form of the letters is based on an Indic alphabet of that period. The most important, an official orthography aimed to facilitate the translation of Buddhist scriptures, Standard orthography has not altered since then, while the spoken language has changed by, for example, losing complex consonant clusters. As a result, in all modern Tibetan dialects, in particular in the Standard Tibetan of Lhasa and this divergence is the basis of an argument in favour of spelling reform, to write Tibetan as it is pronounced, for example, writing Kagyu instead of Bka-rgyud. In contrast, the pronunciation of the Balti, Ladakhi and Burig languages adheres more closely to the archaic spelling, in the Tibetan script, the syllables are written from left to right. Syllables are separated by a tsek, since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, spaces are not used to divide words. The Tibetan alphabet has thirty basic letters, sometimes known as radicals, as in other Indic scripts, each consonant letter assumes an inherent vowel, in the Tibetan script its ཨ /a/. The alphabet ཨ /a/ is also the base for dependent vowels marks, although some Tibetan dialects are tonal, the language had no tone at the time of the scripts invention, and there are no dedicated symbols for tone. However, since tones developed from segmental features they can usually be predicted by the archaic spelling of Tibetan words. The unique aspect of the Tibetan script is that the consonants can be either as radicals, or they can be written in other forms. To understand how this works, one can look at the radical ཀ /ka/, in both cases, the symbol for ཀ /ka/ is used, but when the ར /ra/ is in the middle of the consonant and vowel, it is added as a subscript. On the other hand, when the ར /ra/ comes before the consonant and vowel, ར /ra/ actually changes form when it is above most other consonants, thus རྐ rka. However, an exception to this is the cluster རྙ /rnya/, similarly, the consonants ཝ /wa/, ར /ra/, and ཡ /ja/ change form when they are beneath other consonants, thus ཀྭ /kwa/, ཀྲ /kra/, ཀྱ /kja/. Besides being written as subscripts and superscripts, some consonants can also be placed in prescript, postscript, the third position, the post-postscript position is solely for the consonants ད /tʰa/ and ས /sa/. The superscript position above a radical is reserved for the consonants ར /ra/, ལ /la/, the vowels used in the alphabet are ཨ /a/, ཨི /i/, ཨུ /u/, ཨེ /e/, and ཨོ /o/

12.
Unicode range
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The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0

13.
Gupta Empire
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The Gupta Empire was an ancient Indian empire founded by Sri Gupta. The empire existed at its zenith from approximately 320 to 550 CE, the peace and prosperity created under the leadership of the Guptas enabled the pursuit of scientific and artistic endeavors. Chandragupta I, Samudragupta, and Chandragupta II were the most notable rulers of the Gupta dynasty, the high points of the period is great cultural developments which took place during the reign of Chandragupta II. Science and political administration reached new heights during the Gupta era, strong trade ties also made the region an important cultural center and set the region up as a base that would influence nearby kingdoms and regions in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. The earliest available Indian epics are also thought to have committed to written texts around this period. After the collapse of the Gupta Empire in the 6th century, a minor line of the Gupta clan continued to rule Magadha after the disintegration of the empire. These Guptas were ultimately ousted by Vardhana ruler Harsha, who established his empire in the first half of the 7th century, according to many historians, the Gupta dynasty was a Vaishya dynasty. Historian Ram Sharan Sharma asserts that the Vaishya Guptas appeared as a reaction against oppressive rulers, brannigan, the rise of the Gupta Empire was one of the most prominent violations of the caste system in ancient India. There is controversy among scholars about the homeland of the Guptas. Jayaswal has pointed out that the Guptas were originally inhabitants of Prayaga, Uttar Pradesh, in north India, another scholar, Gayal supported the theory of Jaiswal, suggesting that the original home of the Guptas was Antarvedi embracing the regions of Oudh and Prayag. However another historian of this time in Indian history, Ganguli, has offered a different view about the original Gupta homeland, according to him the Guptas homeland is further south, the Murshidabad region of Bengal, and not Magadha in Bihar. He based his theory on the statement of the Chinese Buddhist monk, Yijing, fleet and other historians however criticize Gangulis theory because Sri Gupta ruled during the end of the 3rd century, but Yijing placed him at the end of the 2nd century. Hence the theory of historians, who have provided their views based on the accounts of Yijing, are considered less valid than theories based on sources such as coinage. From these theories, several conflicting opinions about the original homeland, according to Allan and a few other scholars, the Guptas were initially concentrated in the region of Magadha and from there they extended their sway to Bengal. According to other groups, the homeland of the Guptas was Varendri or the Varendra Bhumi in Bengal. Whatever the theory is, the rule of the Guptas initiated the Golden Age in history of ancient India, bengali historians like HC Raychoudhuri the Guptas originated from the Varendri region which is now part of Rangpur and Rajshahi Division of modern-day Bangladesh. DC Ganguly, on the hand, considers the surrounding region of Murshidabad as the original home of the Guptas. The most likely time for the reign of Sri Gupta is c, the Murundas who were feudal lords of Kushans provided or granted land to Srigupta

14.
Japanese language
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Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 125 million speakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic language family, whose relation to language groups, particularly to Korean. Little is known of the prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, during the Heian period, Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese saw changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, the standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo region in the Early Modern Japanese period. Following the end in 1853 of Japans self-imposed isolation, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly, English loanwords in particular have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated. Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person, Japanese equivalents of adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener. Japanese has no relationship with Chinese, but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or kanji, in its writing system. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system uses two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Latin script is used in a fashion, such as for imported acronyms. Very little is known about the Japanese of this period, Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language. Through the spread of Buddhism, the Chinese writing system was imported to Japan, the earliest texts found in Japan are written in Classical Chinese, but they may have been meant to be read as Japanese by the kanbun method. Some of these Chinese texts show the influences of Japanese grammar, in these hybrid texts, Chinese characters are also occasionally used phonetically to represent Japanese particles. The earliest text, the Kojiki, dates to the early 8th century, the end of Old Japanese coincides with the end of the Nara period in 794

15.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world

16.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks

17.
Alphabet
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets

18.
Visarga
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In Sanskrit phonology, visarga is the name of a phone, written as, Visarga is an allophone of /r/ and /s/ in pausa. Since /-s/ is an inflectional suffix, visarga appears frequently in Sanskrit texts. In the traditional order of Sanskrit sounds, visarga and anusvāra appear between vowels and stop consonants, the precise pronunciation of visarga in Vedic texts may vary between Śākhās. Some pronounce a slight echo of the vowel after the fricative, aḥ will be pronounced. The visarga is commonly found in writing, resembling the punctuation mark of colon or as two tiny circles one above the other and this form is retained by most Indian scripts. According to Sanskrit phonologists, the visarga has two allophones, namely जिह्वामूलीय and उपध्मानीय. The former may be pronounced before ⟨क⟩, ⟨ख⟩, and the latter before ⟨प⟩, and ⟨फ⟩, as in तव पितामहः कः, पक्षिणः खे उड्डयन्ते, भोः पाहि, and तपःफलम्. Both of them are written as two crescent-shaped semi-circles one above the other, facing the top and bottom respectively, distinct signs for Jihavamuliya and Upadhmania exists in Kannada, Tibetan, Sharada, Brahmi and Lantsa scripts. In the Burmese alphabet, the visarga, when used with joined to a letter, motoori Norinaga invented a mark for visarga which he used in a book about Indian orthography

19.
Heart Sutra
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The Heart Sūtra is a popular sutra in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its Sanskrit title, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, can be translated as The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom, the Heart Sūtra is often cited as the best-known and most popular Mahāyāna Buddhist scripture. The text has been translated into English dozens of times from both Chinese and Sanskrit, the Heart Sūtra, belonging to the Perfection of Wisdom category of Mahāyāna Buddhism literature, is along with the Diamond Sutra, the most prominent representative of the genre. The text exists in two versions, a longer and a shorter, the shorter appears to be the original, while the longer has been extended by the addition of stereotypical passages typically associated with Buddhist sutras composed in India. The Chinese Buddhist canon includes both long and short versions, and both versions exist in Sanskrit, in the Tibetan canon only the longer version is preserved, although Tibetan translations without the framing text have been found at Dunhuang. The Chinese version of the text attributed to Xuanzang has 260 Chinese characters. This makes it one of the shortest texts in the Perfection of Wisdom genre, the Heart Sūtra is often said to contain the entire meaning of the longer Sutras. Conze estimates the date of origin to be 350 CE. Recent scholarship is unable to verify its existence before any earlier than the 7th century CE. The Chinese version attribute to Xuanzang is frequently chanted by the Chan, Zen, Seon, and Thiền schools during ceremonies in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam respectively. It is also significant to Shingon Buddhism, whose founder Kūkai wrote a commentary on it, and to the various Tibetan Buddhist schools, where it is studied extensively. The text has been translated into many languages, and dozens of English translations and commentaries have been published, the text was probably intended as a dhāraṇī rather than a sutra. According to Huilis biography, Xuanzang learned the sutra from an inhabitant of Sichuan, the earliest extant text of the Heart Sūtra is a stone stele dated to 672 CE. It contains the Chinese text also preserved in the Chinese Tripiṭaka, the stele was originally erected at Hongfu monastery, in Changan by Emperor Gao. Müllers Sanskrit edition of 1881, based on the Horyuji manuscript Apocryphal stories exist of earlier Chinese versions, zhi Qians version, supposedly composed in 200-250 CE, was lost before the time of Xuanzang. Edward Conze acknowledges that T250, the attributed to Kumarajīva, is the work of his student. It is not mentioned in a biography compiled in 519 CE, john McRae and Jan Nattier have argued that this translation was created by someone else, much later, based on Kumarajivas Large Sūtra. T251 in the Chinese Tripiṭaka is the first to use the title Heart Sūtra, Fukui Fumimasa has argued that 心經 actually means dhāraṇī scripture

20.
Palm-leaf manuscript
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Palm-leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. Palm leaves were used as writing materials in South Asia and in Southeast Asia dating back to the 5th century BCE and their use began in South Asia, and spread elsewhere, as texts on dried and smoke treated palm leaves of Borassus species or the Ola leaf. One of the oldest surviving palm leaf manuscript is a Sanskrit Shaivism text from the 9th-century, discovered in Nepal, palm leaf manuscripts were written in ink on rectangular cut and cured palm leaf sheet. Each sheet typically had a hole through which a string could pass through, a palm leaf text thus created would typically last between a few decades and about 600 years before it decayed due to dampness, insect activity, mold and fragility. Thus the document had to be copied onto new sets of dried palm leaves, the oldest surviving palm leaf Indian manuscripts have been found in colder, drier climates such as in parts of Nepal, Tibet and central Asia, the source of 1st-millennium CE manuscripts. The individual sheets of palm leaves were called Patra or Parna in Sanskrit, the famous 5th-century CE Indian manuscript called the Bower Manuscript discovered in Chinese Turkestan, was written on birch-bark sheets shaped in the form of treated palm leaves. Hindu temples often served as centers where ancient manuscripts were used for learning. Archaeological and epigraphical evidence indicates existence of libraries called Sarasvati-bhandara, dated possibly to early 12th-century and employing librarians, palm leaf manuscripts were also preserved inside Jain temples and in Buddhist monasteries. With the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asian countries like as Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines, one of the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts on palm leaves is of the Parameshvaratantra, a Shaiva Siddhanta text of Hinduism. It is from the 9th-century, and dated to about 828 CE, the discovered palm-leaf collection also includes a few parts of another text, the Jñānārṇavamahātantra and currently held by the University of Cambridge. With the introduction of printing presses in the early 19th century, many governments are making efforts to preserve what is left of their palm leaf documents. Palm leaf manuscripts of Odisha include scriptures, pictures of Devadasi, some of the early discoveries of Odia palm leaf manuscripts include writings like Smaradipika, Ratimanjari, Pancasayaka and Anangaranga in both Odia and Sanskrit. State Museum of Odisha at Bhubaneswar houses 40,000 palm leaf manuscripts. Most of them are written in the Odia script, the oldest manuscript here belongs to the 14th century but the text can be dated to the 2nd century. In 1997 The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation recognised the Tamil Medical Manuscript Collection as part of the Memory of the World Register. A very good example of usage of palm leaf manuscripts to store the history is a Tamil grammar book named Tolkāppiyam which was written around 3rd century BCE. A global digitalization project led by the Tamil Heritage Foundation collects, in Indonesia the palm-leaf manuscript is called lontar. The Indonesian word is the form of Old Javanese rontal. It is composed of two Old Javanese words, namely ron leaf and tal Borassus flabellifer, palmyra palm, due to the shape of the palmyra palms leaves, which are spread like a fan, these trees are also known as fan trees

21.
Later Tang
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Tang, known in history as Later Tang, was a short-lived imperial dynasty that lasted from 923 to 937 during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in the history of China. The first three of Later Tangs four emperors were ethnically sinicized Shatuo, the name Tang was used to legitimize itself as the restorer of the Tang dynasty. Although Later Tang officially began in 923, the dynasty already existed in the years before, at its height, Later Tang controlled most of northern China. From the fall of the Tang Dynasty in 907, a rivalry had developed between the successor Later Liang, formed by Zhu Wen, and the State of Jin, formed by Li Keyong, in present-day Shanxi. The rivalry survived the death of Li Keyong, whose son Li Cunxu continued to expand Jin territories at the expense of the Later Liang. Li Keyong forged an alliance with the powerful Khitan, like the Shatuo a people of the northern steppe, Li Cunxu was successful in overthrowing the Later Liang in 923 and proclaimed himself emperor of the Later Tang, which he referred to as the “Restored Tang”. As a part of “restoring the Tang”, the capital was moved back to the old Tang eastern seat of Luoyang, the Later Tang was a short-lived regime, lasting only thirteen years. Li Cunxu himself lived only three years after the founding of the dynasty, having been killed during a rebellion in 926. Li Siyuan, the son of Li Keyong, took over the dynasty. The Later Tang controlled considerably more territory at its height than did the Later Liang and it extended to all the northern territories controlled by the Later Liang as well as its own base in Shanxi. It also had control over the areas around Beijing and Shaanxi, the largest expansion of the Later Tang occurred in 925 when they conquered the Former Shu State, centered in present-day Sichuan. However, as Later Tang power was waning, a Later Shu state formed in 934, a year before the fall of the Later Tang

22.
Itsukushima
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Itsukushima is an island in the western part of the Inland Sea of Japan, located in the northwest of Hiroshima Bay. It is popularly known as Miyajima, which in Japanese means the Shrine Island, the island is one of Hayashi Gahōs Three Views of Japan specified in 1643. Itsukushima is part of the city of Hatsukaichi in Hiroshima Prefecture, the island was part of the former town of Miyajima before the 2005 merger with Hatsukaichi. Itsukushima is famous for the Itsukushima Shrine, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, according to records, the shrine was established in the time of Empress Suiko. The warrior-courtier Taira no Kiyomori gave the shrine its present form, in 1555, Mōri Motonari defeated Sue Harukata at the Battle of Miyajima. Toyotomi Hideyoshi built a building, the Senjō-kaku, on a hill above the shrine. Itsukushima has a number of temples, including Toyokuni Shrine with a five-storied pagoda, the island is also famous for its upper hill side cherry blossoms and maple leaf autumn foliage. The island of Itsukushima, including the waters around it, are within Setonaikai National Park and this sea is affected by strong tides. At low tide, the bottom of the sea is exposed past the islands torii, at high tide, the sea covers all the previously exposed seabed mud and fills areas underneath the shrine boardwalk. Itsukushima is mountainous and sparsely settled and it has an elementary school and a middle school. It is rural and mountainous, only 30.39 square kilometres, there are no cities, only small towns with simple houses and privately owned shops. The islanders work hard to preserve the forests and respect nature, frequent ferry services, operated by JR West and by Miyajima Matsudai Tourist Ship, carry traffic between the island and the mainland. The trip takes ten minutes. There is an express passenger ferry to Hiroshima harbour. Miyajimas maple trees are renowned throughout Japan and blanket the island in crimson in the autumn, momiji manjū, pastries filled with azuki jam or custard, are popular souvenirs and carry maple-leaf emblems. Many other varieties such as chocolate and cheese are available, because the island is seen as sacred, trees may not be cut for lumber. Deer are thought of as sacred in the native Shinto religion because they are considered messengers of the gods and they walk the streets of the city, not afraid of the tourists. The shamoji, a style of wooden spoon used to serve cooked rice without impairing the taste, is said to have been invented by a monk who lived on the island, the shamoji is a popular souvenir, and there are some outsized examples around the shopping district

23.
Buddhist texts
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They can be categorized in a number of ways. These religious texts were written in different languages and scripts. Even after the development of printing, Buddhists preferred to keep to their practices with these texts. The Mahāsāṃghika and the Mūlasarvāstivāda considered both the Buddhas discourses, and of his disciples, to be buddhavacana, a number of different beings such as buddhas, disciples of the buddha, ṛṣis, and devas were considered capable to transmitting buddhavacana. The content of such a discourse was then to be collated with the sūtras, compared with the Vinaya and these texts may then be certified as true buddhavacana by a buddha, a saṃgha, a small group of elders, or one knowledgeable elder. In Theravada Buddhism, the collection of buddhavacana is the Pali Canon. Some scholars believe that some portions of the Pali Canon and Agamas could contain the substance of the historical teachings of the Buddha. In East Asian Buddhism, what is considered buddhavacana is collected in the Chinese Buddhist canon, the most common edition of this is the Taishō Tripiṭaka. Then these sutras may be regarded as buddhavacana. Sometimes texts that are considered commentaries by some are regarded by others as Buddhavacana, in Tibetan Buddhism, what is considered buddhavacana is collected in the Kangyur. The East Asian and Tibetan Buddhist canons always combined Buddhavacana with other literature in their standard collected editions, however, the general view of what is and is not buddhavacana is broadly similar between East Asian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan Kangyur, which belongs to the schools of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, in addition to containing sutras and vinaya. Doctrinal elaborations were preserved in Abhidharma works and later Karikas, as Buddhism spread geographically, these texts were translated into the local language, such as Chinese and Tibetan. The Pali canon was preserved in Sri Lanka where it was first written down in the first century BCE, the Sri Lankan Pali tradition developed extensive commentaries as well as sub-commentaries for the Pali Canon as well as treatises on Abhidhamma. Sutra commentaries and Abhidharma works also exist in Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, important examples of non-canonical Pali texts are the Visuddhimagga, by Buddhaghosa, which is a compendium of Theravada teachings and the Mahavamsa, a historical Sri Lankan chronicle. Sanskrit Buddhist literature later became the dominant tradition in India until the decline of Buddhism in India, around the beginning of the Christian era, a new genre of sutra literature began to be written with a focus on the Bodhisattva idea, commonly known as Mahayana sutras. Many of the Mahayana sutras were written in Sanskrit and then translated into the Tibetan, some 600 Mahayana Sutras have survived in Sanskrit, or in Chinese and/or Tibetan translation. In the Mahayana tradition there are important works termed Shastras, or treatises which attempt to outline the sutra teachings, the works of important Buddhist philosophers like Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu and Dharmakirti are generally termed Shastras, and were written in Sanskrit

24.
Silk Road
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While the term is of modern coinage, the Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han dynasty. The Han dynasty expanded Central Asian sections of the routes around 114 BCE, largely through missions and explorations of the Chinese imperial envoy. The Chinese took great interest in the safety of their trade products, though silk was certainly the major trade item exported from China, many other goods were traded, as well as religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies. Diseases, most notably plague, also spread along the Silk Routes, in addition to economic trade, the Silk Road was a route for cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. The main traders during antiquity included the Chinese, Arabs, Turkmens, Indians, Persians, Somalis, Greeks, Syrians, Romans, Georgians, Armenians, Bactrians, in June 2014, UNESCO designated the Changan-Tianshan corridor of the Silk Road as a World Heritage Site. The Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative Eurasian silk and horse trade, the German terms Seidenstraße and Seidenstraßen were coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen, who made seven expeditions to China from 1868 to 1872. The term Silk Route is also used, although the term was coined in the 19th century, it did not gain widespread acceptance in academia or popularity among the public until the 20th century. The first book entitled The Silk Road was by Swedish geographer Sven Hedin in 1938, the fall of the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain in 1989 led to a surge of public and academic interest in Silk Road sites and studies in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Use of the term Silk Road is not without its detractors and he notes that traditional authors discussing East-West trade such as Marco Polo and Edward Gibbon never labelled any route as a silk one in particular. From the 2nd millennium BCE, nephrite jade was being traded from mines in the region of Yarkand, some remnants of what was probably Chinese silk dating from 1070 BCE have been found in Ancient Egypt. The Great Oasis cities of Central Asia played a role in the effective functioning of the Silk Road trade. This style is reflected in the rectangular belt plaques made of gold and bronze, with other versions in jade. The tomb of a Scythian prince near Stuttgart, Germany, dated to the 6th century BCE, was excavated and found to have not only Greek bronzes but also Chinese silks. Scythians accompanied the Assyrian Esarhaddon on his invasion of Egypt, soghdian Scythian merchants played a vital role in later periods in the development of the Silk Road. By the time of Herodotus, the Royal Road of the Persian Empire ran some 2,857 km from the city of Susa on the Karun to the port of Smyrna on the Aegean Sea. It was maintained and protected by the Achaemenid Empire and had postal stations, by having fresh horses and riders ready at each relay, royal couriers could carry messages the entire distance in nine days, while normal travellers took about three months. The next major step in the development of the Silk Road was the expansion of the Greek empire of Alexander the Great into Central Asia and this later became a major staging point on the northern Silk Route. They continued to expand eastward, especially during the reign of Euthydemus, there are indications that he may have led expeditions as far as Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, leading to the first known contacts between [China and the West around 200 BCE

25.
Tantra
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Tantra is the esoteric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism that co-developed most likely about the middle of 1st millennium CE. The term tantra, in the Indian traditions, also means any systematic broadly applicable text, theory, system, method, instrument, in Hinduism, the tantra tradition is most often associated with its goddess tradition called Shaktism, followed by Shaivism and Vaishnavism. In Buddhism, the Vajrayana tradition is known for its extensive tantra ideas, Tantric Hindu and Buddhist traditions have influenced other religious traditions such as Jainism, Sikhism, the Tibetan Bön tradition, Daoism, and the Japanese Shintō tradition. Tantra as genre of literature in Hinduism have been influential to its arts, icons, Hindu puja, temples and iconography are tantric in nature. The Hindu texts that describe these topics are called Tantras, Āgamas or Samhitās, in Buddhism, its tantra-genre literature has influenced the artworks in Tibet, historic cave temples of India, and imagery in southeast Asia. Tantra literally means loom, warp, weave, the connotation of the word tantra to mean an esoteric practice or religious ritualism is a colonial era European invention. The term is based on the metaphor of weaving, states Ron Barrett and it implies interweaving of traditions and teachings as threads into a text, technique or practice. The word appears in the hymns of the Rigveda such as in 10.71 and it is found in many other Vedic era texts, such as in section 10.7.42 of the Atharvaveda and many Brahmanas. In these and post-Vedic texts, the meaning of Tantra is that which is principal or essential part, main point, model, framework. The term “Tantra” after about 500 BCE, in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism is a bibliographic category, the same Buddhist texts are sometimes referred to as tantra or sutra, for example, Vairocabhisambodhi-tantra is also referred to as Vairocabhisambodhi-sutra. The various contextual meaning of the word Tantra varies with the Indian text, the earliest definitions and expositions on Tantra come from the ancient texts of Panini, Patanjali and the literature of the language-focussed, ritual-oriented Mimamsa school of Hindu philosophy. The word tantra, states Patanjali, means principal, main, Patanjali also offers a semantic definition of Tantra, stating that it is structural rules, standard procedures, centralized guide or knowledge in any field that applies to many elements. The ancient Mimamsa school of Hinduism uses the term tantra extensively, for example, When an action or a thing, once complete, becomes beneficial in several matters to one person, or to many people, that is known as Tantra. For example, a lamp placed amidst many priests, in contrast, that which benefits by its repetition is called Āvāpa, such as massaging with oil. Medieval texts present their own definitions of Tantra, in modern era scholarship, Tantra has been studied as an esoteric practice and ritualistic religion, sometimes referred to as Tantrism. There is wide gap between what Tantra means to its followers, and what Tantra has been represented or perceived as since colonial era writers began commenting on Tantra, many definitions of Tantra have been proposed ever since, and there is no universally accepted definition of Tantra. André Padoux in his review of Tantra definitions offers two, then rejects both, another definition, more common among observers and non-practitioners, is some set of mechanistic rituals, omitting entirely the ideological side. According to David N. Lorenzen, two different kinds of definitions of Tantra exist, a definition and a broad definition

26.
Nalanda
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The campus is situated near Chathamangalam,22 kilometres north east of Kozhikode, on the Kozhikode–Mukkam Road. It was established in 1961 and was known as Calicut Regional Engineering College until 2002 and it is one of the National Institutes of Technology established by the Government of India for imparting high standard technical education to students from all over the country. The college is among the few institutions in the country to host a supercomputer of its own. National Institute of Technology, Calicut was set up in 1961 as Regional Engineering College Calicut, the ninth of its kind, until the formation of Calicut University in 1963, the institute was affiliated with Kerala University. It was largely due to the efforts of Pattom Thanu Pillai, then Chief Minister of Kerala, the classes were initially held at the Government Polytechnic at West Hill, before it moved to its present campus in 1963. The college started with an intake of 125 students for the undergraduate courses. The intake for the courses was increased to 250 in 1966,150 for the first year and 100 for the preparatory course. The annual intake was reduced from 250 to 200 from the year 1968–69 on account of industrial recession, after Prof S. Unnikrishnan Pillai took charge as principal in 1983, the Training and Placement Department was started to organise campus recruitments for students. The college moved into the area of technology in 1984 with the commissioning of multi-user PSI Omni system. In 1987 the college celebrated 25 years of its existence, the CEDTI was established on the campus the following year. In 1990 Shankar Dayal Sharma inaugurated the Architecture Department Block and construction of a centre was completed. In 1996, the website was launched. The Indian Institute of Management Calicut functioned from the NIT campus in its first few years of existence before moving to its new campus in Kunnamangalam in 2003. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, accorded NIT status to REC Calicut in June 2002 granting it academic and it was a lead institute under the World Bank-funded Technical Education Quality Improvement Program which began in 2002. In 2003, students were first admitted to the flagship undergraduate B. Tech through the All India Engineering Entrance Exam, with the passing of the National Institutes of Technology Act in May 2007, NIT Calicut was declared an Institute of National Importance. The National Institutes of Technology Act is the legislation for technical education institutions after the Indian Institutes of Technology Act of 1961. In 2007 NIT Calicut raised its annual intake for its program to 570. The annual intake for undergraduate program was increased to 1049 by 2011, under the constitution of the National Institutes of Technology Act 2007, the President of India is the Visitor to the institute

27.
Chinese language
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Min, and Yue. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six languages of the United Nations. The written form of the language, based on the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is the spoken language and official in Hong Kong and Macau. It is also influential in Guangdong province and much of Guangxi, dialects of Southern Min, part of the Min group, are widely spoken in southern Fujian, with notable variants also spoken in neighboring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia. Hakka also has a diaspora in Taiwan and southeast Asia. Shanghainese and other Wu varieties are prominent in the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, Chinese can be traced back to a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan proto-language. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty, as the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have sought to promulgate a unified standard. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, in addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, the earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty

28.
Abbasid Caliphate
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The Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Abbasid dynasty descended from Muhammads youngest uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and they ruled as caliphs, for most of their period from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after assuming authority over the Muslim empire from the Umayyads in 750 CE. The Abbasid caliphate first centered its government in Kufa, but in 762 the caliph Al-Mansur founded the city of Baghdad, the political power of the caliphs largely ended with the rise of the Buyids and the Seljuq Turks. Although Abbasid leadership over the vast Islamic empire was reduced to a ceremonial religious function. The capital city of Baghdad became a center of science, culture, philosophy and this period of cultural fruition ended in 1258 with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan. The Abbasid line of rulers, and Muslim culture in general, though lacking in political power, the dynasty continued to claim authority in religious matters until after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. The Abbasid caliphs were Arabs descended from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of the youngest uncles of Muhammad, the Abbasids claimed to be the true successors of Prophet Muhammad in replacing the Umayyad descendants of Banu Umayya by virtue of their closer bloodline to Muhammad. The Abbasids also distinguished themselves from the Umayyads by attacking their moral character, according to Ira Lapidus, The Abbasid revolt was supported largely by Arabs, mainly the aggrieved settlers of Marw with the addition of the Yemeni faction and their Mawali. The Abbasids also appealed to non-Arab Muslims, known as mawali, Muhammad ibn Ali, a great-grandson of Abbas, began to campaign for the return of power to the family of Prophet Muhammad, the Hashimites, in Persia during the reign of Umar II. During the reign of Marwan II, this culminated in the rebellion of Ibrahim the Imam. On 9 June 747, Abu Muslim successfully initiated a revolt against Umayyad rule. Close to 10,000 soldiers were under Abu Muslims command when the hostilities began in Merv. General Qahtaba followed the fleeing governor Nasr ibn Sayyar west defeating the Umayyads at the Battle of Nishapur, the Battle of Gorgan, after this loss, Marwan fled to Egypt, where he was subsequently assassinated. The remainder of his family, barring one male, were also eliminated, immediately after their victory, As-Saffah sent his forces to Central Asia, where his forces fought against Tang expansion during the Battle of Talas. Barmakids, who were instrumental in building Baghdad, introduced the worlds first recorded paper mill in Baghdad, As-Saffah focused on putting down numerous rebellions in Syria and Mesopotamia. The Byzantines conducted raids during these early distractions, the first change the Abbasids, under Al-Mansur, made was to move the empires capital from Damascus, in Syria, to Baghdad in Iraq. Baghdad was established on the Tigris River in 762, a new position, that of the vizier, was also established to delegate central authority, and even greater authority was delegated to local emirs. During Al-Mansurs time control of Al-Andalus was lost, and the Shiites revolted and were defeated a year later at the Battle of Bakhamra, the Abbasids had depended heavily on the support of Persians in their overthrow of the Umayyads

29.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon

30.
Mantra
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A Mantra is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit believed by practitioners to have psychological and spiritual powers. A mantra may or may not have syntactic structure or literal meaning, the earliest mantras were composed in Vedic Sanskrit by Hindus in India, and are at least 3000 years old. Mantras now exist in various schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, in Japanese Shingon tradition, the word Shingon means mantra. Similar hymns, chants, compositions and concepts are found in Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Christianity, the use, structure, function, importance, and types of mantras vary according to the school and philosophy of Hinduism and of Buddhism. Mantras serve a role in tantra. In this school, mantras are considered to be a sacred formula, in other schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism, initiation is not a requirement. Mantras come in forms, including ṛc and sāman. They are typically melodic, mathematically structured meters, believed to be resonant with numinous qualities, at its simplest, the word ॐ serves as a mantra. In more sophisticated forms, mantras are melodic phrases with spiritual interpretations such as a longing for truth, reality, light, immortality, peace, love, knowledge. Some mantras have no meaning, yet are musically uplifting. The Sanskrit word mantra- consists of the root man- to think, scholars consider mantras to be older than 1000 BC. By the middle Vedic period—1000 BC to 500 BC—claims Frits Staal, mantras in Hinduism had developed into a blend of art, the Chinese translation is zhenyan 眞言, 真言, literally true words, the Japanese onyomi reading of the Chinese being shingon. Mantras are neither unique to Hinduism, nor to other Indian religions such as Buddhism, similar creative constructs developed in Asian, mantras, suggests Frits Staal, may be older than language. There is no accepted definition of mantra. Renou has defined mantra as thought, mantras are structured formulae of thoughts, claims Silburn. Farquhar concludes that mantras are a religious thought, prayer, sacred utterance, zimmer defines mantra as a verbal instrument to produce something in one’s mind. There is no universally applicable uniform definition of mantra because mantras are used in different religions, in some schools of Hinduism for example, suggests Gonda, mantra is sakti to the devotee in the form of formulated and expressed thought. Staal clarifies that mantras are not rituals, they are what is recited or chanted during a ritual, There is a long history of scholarly disagreement on the meaning of mantras and whether they are really instruments of mind, as implied by the etymological origin of the word mantra

31.
Shingon Buddhism
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For that reason, it is often called Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, or Orthodox Esoteric Buddhism. The word Shingon is the Japanese reading of Chinese, 真言 Zhēnyán True Words, Kūkai returned to Japan as Huiguos lineage- and Dharma-successor. Shingon followers usually refer to Kūkai as Kōbō-Daishi or Odaishi-sama, the name given to him years after his death by Emperor Daigo. Before he went to China, Kūkai had been an independent monk in Japan for over a decade and he was extremely well versed in classical Chinese prose, calligraphy and Buddhist texts. Esoteric Buddhism was not considered to be a different sect or school yet at that time, Huiguo was the first person to gather the still scattered elements of Indian and Chinese Esoteric Buddhism into a cohesive system. When Kūkai was 22, he learned this mantra from Gonsō and he persevered in this mantra practice for seven years and mastered it. According to tradition, this brought him siddhis of superhuman memory retention. Kūkai would later praise the power and efficacy of Kokuzō-Gumonjiho practice, kūkais respect for Ākāśagarbha was so great that he regarded him as his honzon for the rest of his life. It was also during this period of intense mantra practice that Kūkai dreamt of a man telling him to out the Mahavairocana Tantra for the doctrine that he sought. The Mahavairocana Tantra had only recently made available in Japan. He was able to obtain a copy in Chinese but large portions were in Sanskrit in the Siddhaṃ script, which he did not know, and even the Chinese portions were too arcane for him to understand. He believed that teaching was a door to the truth he sought. Thus, Kūkai resolved to travel to China to spend the necessary to fully understand the Mahavairocana Tantra. When Kūkai reached China and first met Huiguo on the month of 805, Huiguo was age sixty. Huiguo exclaimed to Kūkai in Chinese, At last, you have come, I have been waiting for you. Quickly, prepare yourself for initiation into the mandalas, Huiguo had foreseen that Esoteric Buddhism would not survive in India and China in the near future and that it was Kukais destiny to see it continue in Japan. In the short space of three months, Huiguo initiated and taught Kūkai everything he knew on the doctrines and practices of the Mandala of the Two Realms as well as mastery of Sanskrit and Chinese. Huiguo declared Kūkai to be his disciple and proclaimed him a Dharma successor

32.
Tendai
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Tendai is a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism, a descendant of the Chinese Tiantai or Lotus Sutra school. David W. Philosophically, the Tendai school did not deviate substantially from the beliefs that had created by the Tiantai school in China. However, what Saichō transmitted from China was not exclusively Tiantai, but also included Zen, the esoteric Mikkyō, the tendency to include a range of teachings became more marked in the doctrines of Saichōs successors, such as Ennin and Enchin. However, in years, this range of teachings began to form sub-schools within Tendai Buddhism. By the time of Ryōgen, there were two groups on Mt. Hiei, the Sammon Mountain Group who followed Ennin and the Jimon Temple Group who followed Enchin. The Tendai sect flourished under the patronage of the Imperial House, in 794, the Imperial capital was moved to Kyoto. Tendai Buddhism became the dominant form of mainstream Buddhism in Japan for many years, nichiren, Hōnen, Shinran and Dōgen—all famous thinkers in non-Tendai schools of Japanese Buddhism—were all initially trained as Tendai monks. Japanese Buddhism was dominated by the Tendai school to a greater degree than Chinese Buddhism was by its forebearer. Due to its patronage and growing popularity among the classes, the Tendai sect became not only respected. Enryaku-ji, the complex on Mt. Hiei, became a sprawling center of power, attended not only by ascetic monks. As a result, in 1571 Enryaku-ji was razed by Oda Nobunaga as part of his campaign to unify Japan, Nobunaga regarded the Mt. Hiei monks as a potential threat or rival, as they could employ religious claims to attempt to rally the populace to their side. The temple complex was rebuilt, and continues to serve as the head temple of the Tendai school today. Chih-i, founder of Tien-tai philosophy and practice attempted this synthesis on the basis of the doctrine of the Lotus Sutra. Tendai Buddhism has several philosophical insights which allow for the reconciliation of Buddhist doctrine with aspects of Japanese culture such as Shinto and it is rooted in the idea, fundamental to Mahayana Buddhism, that Buddha-hood, the capability to attain enlightenment, is intrinsic in all things. Also central to Mahayana is the notion that the phenomenal world and this notion poses the problem of how we come to have many differentiated experiences. Tendai Buddhism claims that each and every sense phenomenon just as it is is the expression of Dharma, for Tendai, the ultimate expression of Dharma is the Lotus Sutra. Therefore, the nature of all sense experiences consists in the Buddhas preaching of the doctrine of Lotus Sutra. The existence and experience of all unenlightened beings is fundamentally equivalent, more specifically, Shimaji used original enlightenment thought to designate the intellectual mainstream of medieval Japanese Tendai Buddhism

33.
Chinese Buddhist canon
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The Chinese Buddhist Canon refers to the total body of Buddhist literature deemed canonical in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Buddhism. The traditional term for this canon is Dàzàngjīng, which means the Great Treasury of Sūtras, the Chinese Buddhist canon includes Āgama, Vinaya and Abhidharma texts from Early Buddhist schools, as well as the Mahāyāna sūtras and scriptures from Esoteric Buddhism. There are many versions of the canon in East Asia in different places, an early version is the Fangshan Stone Sutras from the 7th century. The earlier Lung Tripitaka, Jiaxing Tripitaka, and Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka are still extant in printed form. The complete woodblocks are the Tripiṭaka Koreana and the Chenlong Tripitaka, the Tripiṭaka Koreana or Palman Daejanggyeong was carved between 1236 and 1251, during Koreas Goryeo Dynasty, onto 81,340 wooden printing blocks with no known errors in the 52,382,960 characters. It is stored at the Haeinsa temple, South Korea, one of the most used version is Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō. Named after the Taisho era, a modern standardized edition originally published in Tokyo between 1924 and 1934 in 100 volumes and it is also one of the most completely punctuated tripitaka. The Zokuzōkyō version, which is a supplement of another version of the canon, is used as a supplement for Buddhist texts not collected in the Taishō Tripiṭaka. The Jiaxing Tripitaka is a supplement for Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty Buddhist texts not collected, and a Dazangjing Bu Bian published in 1986 are supplements of them. There are newer Tripitaka Sinica projects, the Mi Tripitaka is the Tangut canon. Eric Grinstead published a collection of Tangut Buddhist texts under the title The Tangut Tripitaka in 1971 in New Delhi, the Taishō edition contains classical Japanese works. The Dunhuang edition contains some works in old Western Regions languages, the Tripitaka Sinica mentioned above features a Tibetan section. Modern religious and scholarly works are also excluded but they are published in book series. Pali Canon Tibetan Buddhist canon Sanskrit Buddhist literature

34.
Devanagari
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Devanagari, also called Nagari, is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines. The Nagari script has roots in the ancient Brāhmī script family, the Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. Nagari has been the primus inter pares of the Indic scripts, the Devanagari script is also used for classical Sanskrit texts. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in ancient manuscripts of South India. Devanagari script has forty-seven primary characters, of which fourteen are vowels, the ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters. The script has no distinction similar to the capital and small letters of the Latin alphabet, generally the orthography of the script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet and it is a descendant of the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts, the 7th-century Tibetan king Srong-tsan-gambo ordered that all foreign books be transcribed into the Tibetan language. Other closely related scripts such as Siddham Matrka was in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. Nāgarī is the Sanskrit feminine of Nāgara relating or belonging to a town or city and it is a phrasing with lipi as nāgarī lipi script relating to a city, or spoken in city. The use of the name devanāgarī is relatively recent, and the older term nāgarī is still common, the rapid spread of the term devanāgarī may be related to the almost exclusive use of this script to publish Sanskrit texts in print since the 1870s. As a Brahmic abugida, the principle of Devanagari is that each letter represents a consonant. This is usually written in Latin as a, though it is represented as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter क is read ka, the two letters कन are kana, the three कनय are kanaya, etc. This cancels the inherent vowel, so that from क्नय knaya is derived क्नय् knay, the halant is often used for consonant clusters when typesetting conjunct ligatures is not feasible. Consonant clusters are written with ligatures, for example, the three consonants क्, न्, and य्, when written consecutively without virāma form कनय, as shown above. Alternatively, they may be joined as clusters to form क्नय knaya, कन्य kanya and this system was originally created for use with the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, which have a very limited number of clusters. When applied to Sanskrit, however, it added a deal of complexity to the script

35.
History of Bengal
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The history of Bengal includes modern-day Bangladesh and West Bengal in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, at the apex of the Bay of Bengal and dominated by the fertile Ganges delta. The advancement of civilization in Bengal dates back four millennia, the region was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Gangaridai. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers act as a marker of the region. Bengal, at times, has played an important role in the history of the Indian subcontinent, the areas early history featured a succession of Indian empires, internal squabbling, and a tussle between Hinduism and Buddhism for dominance. Ancient Bengal was the site of several major Janapadas, while the earliest cities date back to the Vedic period, the region was part of several ancient pan-Indian empires, including the Mauryans and Guptas. It was also a bastion of regional kingdoms, the citadel of Gauda served as capital of the Gauda Kingdom, the Buddhist Pala Empire and Hindu Sena Empire. This era saw the development of Bengali language, script, literature, music, art, from the 13th century onward, the region was controlled by the Bengal Sultanate, Hindu Rajas, and Baro-Bhuyan landlords. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Isa Khan, a Muslim Rajput chief, afterwards, the region came under the suzerainty of the Mughal Empire. Under the Mughals, Bengal Subah generated 50% of the empires GDP, the gradual decline of the Mughals led to quasi-independent state under the Nawabs of Bengal, subsequent Maratha expeditions in Bengal, and finally the conquest by the British East India Company. The British took control of the region from the late 18th century, the company consolidated their hold on the region following the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and Battle of Buxar in 1764 and by 1793 took complete control of the region. Kolkata served for years as the capital of British controlled territories in India. The exact origin of the word Bangla is unknown, though it is believed to be derived from the Dravidian-speaking tribe Bang/Banga that settled in the area around the year 1000 BCE. Other accounts speculate that the name is derived from Venga, which came from the Austric word Bonga meaning the Sun-god, according to the Mahabharata, a number of Puranas and the Harivamsha Vanga was one of the adopted sons of King Vali who founded the Vanga Kingdom. It was either under Magadh or under Kalinga Rules except few years under Pals. The Muslim accounts refer that Bong, the earliest reference to Vangala has been traced in the Nesari plates of Rashtrakuta Govinda III which speak of Dharmapala as the king of Vangala. The records of Rajendra Chola I of the Chola dynasty, who invaded Bengal in the 11th century, shams-ud-din Ilyas Shah took the title Shah-e-Bangla and united the whole region under one government. An interesting theory of the origin of the name is provided by Abul-Fazl in his Ain-i-Akbari, from this suffix added to the Bung, the name Bengal arose and gained currency Stone Age tools dating back 20,000 years have been excavated in the state. Remnants of Copper Age settlements in the Bengal region date back 4,000 years, the original settlers spoke non-Aryan languages— they may have spoken Austric or Austro-Asiatic languages like the languages of the present-day Kola, Bhil, Santhal, Shabara, and Pulinda people. At a subsequent age, peoples speaking languages from two other language families— Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman—seem to have settled in Bengal, archaeological discoveries during the 1960s furnished evidence of a degree of civilisation in certain parts of Bengal as far back as the first millennium BC

36.
Central Asia
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Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. It is also referred to as the -stans as the five countries generally considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix -stan. Central Asias five former Soviet republics are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Central Asia has historically been closely tied to its nomadic peoples and the Silk Road. It has acted as a crossroads for the movement of people, goods, the Silk Road connected Muslim lands with the people of Europe, India, and China. This crossroads position has intensified the conflict between tribalism and traditionalism and modernization, in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, Central Asia was predominantly Iranian, peopled by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians and Chorasmians and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Parthians. Central Asia is sometimes referred to as Turkestan, the idea of Central Asia as a distinct region of the world was introduced in 1843 by the geographer Alexander von Humboldt. The borders of Central Asia are subject to multiple definitions, historically built political geography and geoculture are two significant parameters widely used in the scholarly literature about the definitions of the Central Asia. The most limited definition was the one of the Soviet Union. This definition was also used outside the USSR during this period. However, the Russian culture has two terms, Средняя Азия and Центральная Азия. Since then, this has become the most common definition of Central Asia, the UNESCO general history of Central Asia, written just before the collapse of the USSR, defines the region based on climate and uses far larger borders. An alternative method is to define the region based on ethnicity and these areas include Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Turkic regions of southern Siberia, the five republics, and Afghan Turkestan. Afghanistan as a whole, the northern and western areas of Pakistan, the Tibetans and Ladakhi are also included. Insofar, most of the peoples are considered the indigenous peoples of the vast region. Central Asia is a large region of varied geography, including high passes and mountains, vast deserts. The vast steppe areas of Central Asia are considered together with the steppes of Eastern Europe as a geographical zone known as the Eurasian Steppe. Much of the land of Central Asia is too dry or too rugged for farming, the Gobi desert extends from the foot of the Pamirs, 77° E, to the Great Khingan Mountains, 116°–118° E. Central Asia has the following geographic extremes, The worlds northernmost desert, at Buurug Deliin Els, Mongolia, the Northern Hemispheres southernmost permafrost, at Erdenetsogt sum, Mongolia, 46°17′ N

37.
Stop consonant
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In phonetics, a stop, also known as a plosive or oral occlusive, is a consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the blade or body, lips. The terms stop, occlusive, and plosive are often and inaccurately used interchangeably, linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinction being made. The terms refer to different features of the consonant, stop refers to the airflow that is stopped. Occlusive refers to the articulation, which occludes the vocal tract, Plosive refers to the release burst of the consonant. Therefore, a plosive is a stop that is released, typically into an open speech sound such as a vowel. It is inaccurate to call a stop an plosive. Either occlusive or stop may be used as a term covering the other together with nasals. That is, occlusive may be defined as oral occlusives plus nasal occlusives, Ladefoged and Maddieson prefer to restrict stop to oral occlusives. They say, what we call simply nasals are called nasal stops by some linguists and we avoid this phrase, preferring to reserve the term stop for sounds in which there is a complete interruption of airflow. In addition, they use plosive for a stop, stops in their usage include ejective and implosive consonants. If a term such as plosive is used for oral obstruents, in other cases, however, it may be the word plosive that is restricted to the glottal stop. Note that, generally speaking, stops do not have plosion, in English, for example, there are stops with no audible release, such as the /p/ in apt. However, pulmonic stops do have plosion in other environments, in Ancient Greek, the term for stop was ἄφωνον, which means unpronounceable, voiceless, or silent, because stops could not be pronounced without a vowel. This term was calqued into Latin as mūta, and from there borrowed into English as mute, for more information on the Ancient Greek terms, see Ancient Greek phonology § Terminology. All languages in the world have stops, and most have at least the voiceless stops, however, there are exceptions, Colloquial Samoan lacks the coronal, and several North American languages, such as the northern Iroquoian and southern Iroquoian languages, lack the labial. Formal Samoan has only one word with velar, colloquial Samoan conflates /t/, ni‘ihau Hawaiian has for /k/ to a greater extent than Standard Hawaiian, but neither distinguish a /k/ from a /t/. It may be accurate to say that Hawaiian and colloquial Samoan do not distinguish velar

38.
Approximant consonant
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Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence and this class of sounds includes lateral approximants like, non-lateral approximants like, and semivowels like and. Before Peter Ladefoged coined the term approximant in the 1960s, the term frictionless continuant referred to non-lateral approximants, some approximants resemble vowels in acoustic and articulatory properties and the terms semivowel and glide are often used for these non-syllabic vowel-like segments. The correlation between semivowels and vowels is strong enough that cross-language differences between semivowels correspond with the differences between their related vowels, vowels and their corresponding semivowels alternate in many languages depending on the phonological environment, or for grammatical reasons, as is the case with Indo-European ablaut. Similarly, languages often avoid configurations where a semivowel precedes its corresponding vowel, a number of phoneticians distinguish between semivowels and approximants by their location in a syllable. This means that opaque contrasts can occur in languages like Italian, ^* Because of the articulatory complexities of the American English rhotic, there is some variation in its phonetic description. A transcription with the IPA character for an alveolar approximant is common, actual retroflexion may occur as well and both occur as variations of the same sound. ^** Because the vowels are articulated with spread lips, spreading is implied for their approximant analogues, however, these sounds generally have little or no lip-spreading. The fricative letters with a diacritic, ⟨ʝ˕ ɣ˕⟩, may therefore be justified for a neutral articulation between spread and rounded. In articulation and often diachronically, palatal approximants correspond to front vowels, velar approximants to back vowels, in American English, the rhotic approximant corresponds to the rhotic vowel. In addition to alternations, glides can be inserted to the left or the right of their corresponding vowels when they next to a hiatus. Sievers law describes this behaviour for Germanic, in colloquial Nepali speech, a process of glide-formation occurs, where one of two adjacent vowels becomes non-syllabic, the process includes mid vowels so that features a non-syllabic mid vowel. Spanish features a similar process and even nonsyllabic /a/ can occur so that ahorita is pronounced and it is not often clear, however, whether such sequences involve a semivowel or a diphthong, and in many cases, it may not be a meaningful distinction. Although many languages have central vowels, which lie between back/velar and front/palatal, there are few cases of a corresponding approximant, in addition to less turbulence, approximants also differ from fricatives in the precision required to produce them. When emphasized, approximants may be slightly fricated, which is reminiscent of fricatives, for example, the Spanish word ayuda features a palatal approximant that is pronounced as a fricative in emphatic speech. Spanish can be analyzed as having a distinction between fricative, approximant, and intermediate /ʝ ʝ˕ j/. However, such frication is generally slight and intermittent, unlike the strong turbulence of fricative consonants and this is why, for example, the voiceless labialized velar approximant has traditionally been labeled a fricative, and no language is known to contrast it with a voiceless labialized velar fricative. Similarly, Standard Tibetan has a lateral approximant, and Welsh has a voiceless lateral fricative

39.
Fricative consonant
–
Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. This turbulent airflow is called frication, a particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a channel, but in addition. English, and are examples of sibilants, the usage of two other terms is less standardized, Spirant can be a synonym of fricative, or refer to non-sibilant fricatives only. Strident could mean just sibilant, but some authors include also labiodental, lateral or uvular fricatives in the class. However, at the place of articulation, the tongue may take several shapes, domed, laminal, or apical, and each of these is given a separate symbol. Prototypical retroflexes are subapical and palatal, but they are written with the same symbol as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may also be either apical or laminal, voiced uvular fricative voiced pharyngeal fricative No language distinguishes voiced fricatives from approximants at these places, so the same symbol is used for both. For the pharyngeal, approximants are more numerous than fricatives, a fricative realization may be specified by adding the uptack to the letters. Likewise, the downtack may be added to specify an approximant realization, however, in languages such as Arabic, they are true fricatives. In addition, is called a voiceless labial-velar fricative. True doubly articulated fricatives may not occur in any language, Fricatives are very commonly voiced, though cross-linguistically voiced fricatives are not nearly as common as tenuis fricatives. Other phonations are common in languages that have those phonations in their stop consonants, however, phonemically aspirated fricatives are rare. Contrasts with in Korean, aspirated fricatives are found in a few Sino-Tibetan languages, in some Oto-Manguean languages. The record may be Cone Tibetan, which has four contrastive aspirated fricatives, /sʰ/ /ɕʰ/, /ʂʰ/, some South Arabian languages have /z̃/, Umbundu has /ṽ/, and Kwangali and Souletin Basque have /h̃/. In Coatzospan Mixtec, appear allophonically before a vowel, and in Igbo nasality is a feature of the syllable. H is not a fricative in English, until its extinction, Ubykh may have been the language with the most fricatives, some of which did not have dedicated symbols or diacritics in the IPA. This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English, by contrast, approximately 8. 7% of the worlds languages have no phonemic fricatives at all

40.
Voice (phonetics)
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Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterise speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. It can also refer to a classification of sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration. That is the primary use in phonology to describe phonemes or in phonetics to describe phones. At the articulatory level, a sound is one in which the vocal cords vibrate. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters s and z, the two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depending on the context. If one places the fingers on the box, one can feel a vibration while zzzz is pronounced. In most European languages, with an exception being Icelandic, vowels. When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and unvoiced are merely used to group phones and phonemes together for the purposes of classification. The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters for many voiceless and voiced pairs of consonants, in addition, there is a diacritic for voicedness, ⟨◌̬⟩. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiceless sounds, in Unicode, the symbols are encoded U+032C ◌̬ COMBINING CARON BELOW and U+0325 ◌̥ COMBINING RING BELOW. For the example, ₍s̬₎ could be an with voicing in the middle, partial voicing can also be indicated in the normal IPA with transcriptions like and. The distinction between the use of voice and the phonological use rests on the distinction between phone and phoneme. The difference is best illustrated by a rough example, the English word nods is made up of a sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as /nɒdz/, or the sequence of /n/, /ɒ/, /d/, and /z/. Each symbol is a representation of a phoneme. That awareness is an inherent part of speakers mental grammar that allows them to recognise words, however, phonemes are not sounds in themselves. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can actually be pronounced as either the phone or the phone since /z/ is frequently devoiced, even in fluent speech, the sequence of phones for nods might be transcribed as or, depending on the presence or strength of this devoicing. While the phone has articulatory voicing, the phone does not have it, what complicates the matter is that for English, consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless even though it is not the primary distinctive feature between them

Abugida
–
This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional. The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which the symbols cannot be split into separate consonants, abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of South and Southeast

1.
An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Aboriginal Canadian languages

2.
Writing systems

3.
A 19th-century manuscript in the Devanagari script

4.
The Ge'ez script, an abugida of Eritrea and Ethiopia

Sanskrit
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Sanskrit is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, a philosophical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and a literary language and lingua franca of ancient and medieval South Asia. As a result of transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia, as one of the oldest Indo-European languages for wh

1.
Rigveda (padapatha) manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century

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Devi Mahatmya palm-leaf manuscript in an early Bhujimol script, Bihar or Nepal, 11th century

3.
A poem by the ancient Indian poet Vallana (ca. 900 – 1100 CE) on the side wall of a building at the Haagweg 14 in Leiden, Netherlands

4.
Kashmir Shaiva manuscript in the Śāradā script (c. 17th century)

India
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India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and it is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to

1.
Flag

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The granite tower of Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur was completed in 1010 CE by Raja Raja Chola I.

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Writing the will and testament of the Mughal king court in Persian, 1590–1595

East Asia
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East Asia is the eastern subregion of the Asian continent, which can be defined in either geographical or ethno-cultural terms. Geographically and geopolitically, it includes China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Korea and Japan, it covers about 12,000,000 km2, or about 28% of the Asian continent, the East Asian people comprise more than 1.5 billion people. Abo

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Tokyo is the largest city in the world, both in metropolitan population and economy.

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East Asia

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Seoul is the capital and largest city of South Korea (ROK), and is a leading global technology hub.

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Kaohsiung is the second largest city in Taiwan. Kaohsiung Harbor is one of the largest harbors in the world.

Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Ra

1.
Bilingual Greek and Aramaic inscription by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka the Great at Kandahar, Afghanistan, 3rd century BC

Gupta script
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The Gupta script was used for writing Sanskrit and is associated with the Gupta Empire of India which was a period of material prosperity and great religious and scientific developments. The Gupta script was descended from Brahmi and gave rise to the Nāgarī, Sharada, the Gupta Script was descended from the Ashokan Brahmi script, and is a crucial li

1.
Brahmi and its descendent scripts.

Eastern Nagari script
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Eastern Nagari script or Bengali-Assamese script or BA script defines the unified usage of the Bengali script and the Assamese script through minor variations within them, in various languages. Its usage is associated with the two languages, Bengali and Assamese. Beside these two, this system has, throughout history, been used for languages, such a

1.
The text says: " শ্রীশ্রীমত্‌শিরাসিংহমহাৰাজা " Shri-Shri-môt-Shiba-Singhô-Môharaja. The "র" is used as "ব" in this 18th-century manuscript.

Assamese alphabet
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The Assamese script is a writing system of the Assamese language. It used to be the script of choice in the Brahmaputra valley for Sanskrit as well as languages such as Bodo, Khasi. By the 17th century three styles of Assamese script could be identified that converged to the script following typesetting required for printing. The present standard i

1.
The text says: "Shri Shrimat Siva Singha Maharaja". The "র" is used as "ৱ" in this 18th-century manuscript, just as in modern Mithilakshar.

2.
A coin with Assamese script from Ahom dynasty

Bengali alphabet
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The Bengali alphabet or Bangla alphabet or Bangali/Bengali script is the writing system for the Bengali language and is the 5th most widely used writing system in the world due to its population. Historically, the script has also used to write Sanskrit in the region of Bengal. From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali script is an abugida, i

1.
An example of handwritten Bengali script. Part of a poem written by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1926 in Hungary.

Tibetan alphabet
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The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida used to write the Tibetic languages such as Tibetan, as well as Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Ladakhi, and sometimes Balti. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the cursive form used in everyday writing is called umê script. The alphabet is closely linked to a broad ethnic Tibetan identity, spannin

Unicode range
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The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represen

1.
Example of fraction slash use. This typeface (Apple Chancery) shows the synthesized common fraction on the left and the precomposed fraction glyph on the right as a rendering the plain text string “1 1⁄4 1¼”. Depending on the text environment, the single string “1 1⁄4” might yield either result, the one on the right through substitution of the fraction sequence with the single precomposed fraction glyph.

Gupta Empire
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The Gupta Empire was an ancient Indian empire founded by Sri Gupta. The empire existed at its zenith from approximately 320 to 550 CE, the peace and prosperity created under the leadership of the Guptas enabled the pursuit of scientific and artistic endeavors. Chandragupta I, Samudragupta, and Chandragupta II were the most notable rulers of the Gup

1.
Meditating Buddha from the Gupta era, 5th century AD.

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The Gupta Empire at its greatest extent.

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Queen Kumaradevi and King Chandragupta I, depicted on a coin of their son Samudragupta, 335–380.

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Coin of Samudragupta, with Garuda pillar. British Museum.

Japanese language
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Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 125 million speakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic language family, whose relation to language groups, particularly to Korean. Little is known of the prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century record

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A page from Nihon Shoki (The Chronicles of Japan), the second oldest book of classical Japanese history.

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Map of Japanese dialects and Japonic languages

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Two pages from a 12th-century emaki scroll of The Tale of Genji from the 11th century.

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Calligraphy

Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both s

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A Series of Reading workbook in Traditional Chinese used in some Elementary schools in the Philippines.

Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languag

1.
A school slogan asking elementary students to speak Putonghua is annotated with pinyin, but without tonal marks.

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In Yiling, Yichang, Hubei, text on road signs appears both in Chinese characters and in Hanyu Pinyin

Alphabet
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the firs

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Edward Bernard 's "Orbis eruditi", comparing all known alphabets as of 1689.

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Writing systems

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A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.

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Codex Zographensis in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval Bulgaria

Visarga
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In Sanskrit phonology, visarga is the name of a phone, written as, Visarga is an allophone of /r/ and /s/ in pausa. Since /-s/ is an inflectional suffix, visarga appears frequently in Sanskrit texts. In the traditional order of Sanskrit sounds, visarga and anusvāra appear between vowels and stop consonants, the precise pronunciation of visarga in V

1.
The Visarga mark used by Motoori.

Heart Sutra
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The Heart Sūtra is a popular sutra in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its Sanskrit title, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, can be translated as The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom, the Heart Sūtra is often cited as the best-known and most popular Mahāyāna Buddhist scripture. The text has been translated into English dozens of times from both Chinese and Sanskrit, the He

2.
Sanskrit text of the Heart Sūtra in the Siddhaṃ script; replica of the 6th-century palm leaf manuscript preserved at Hōryū-ji (梵本心経并尊勝陀羅尼)

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Sanskrit manuscript of the Heart Sūtra, written in the Siddhaṃ script. Bibliothèque nationale de France

Palm-leaf manuscript
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Palm-leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. Palm leaves were used as writing materials in South Asia and in Southeast Asia dating back to the 5th century BCE and their use began in South Asia, and spread elsewhere, as texts on dried and smoke treated palm leaves of Borassus species or the Ola leaf. One of the oldest survivi

Later Tang
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Tang, known in history as Later Tang, was a short-lived imperial dynasty that lasted from 923 to 937 during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in the history of China. The first three of Later Tangs four emperors were ethnically sinicized Shatuo, the name Tang was used to legitimize itself as the restorer of the Tang dynasty. Although Later

1.
Later Tang 后唐

Itsukushima
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Itsukushima is an island in the western part of the Inland Sea of Japan, located in the northwest of Hiroshima Bay. It is popularly known as Miyajima, which in Japanese means the Shrine Island, the island is one of Hayashi Gahōs Three Views of Japan specified in 1643. Itsukushima is part of the city of Hatsukaichi in Hiroshima Prefecture, the islan

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Itsukushima Island

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This torii at the Itsukushima Shrine welcomes visitors to the island.

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An aerial view of the Itsukushima-jinja torii and the main island from the ropeway/hiking trails of Miyajima.

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Autumn colours on Miyajima Island Japan

Buddhist texts
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They can be categorized in a number of ways. These religious texts were written in different languages and scripts. Even after the development of printing, Buddhists preferred to keep to their practices with these texts. The Mahāsāṃghika and the Mūlasarvāstivāda considered both the Buddhas discourses, and of his disciples, to be buddhavacana, a num

Silk Road
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While the term is of modern coinage, the Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han dynasty. The Han dynasty expanded Central Asian sections of the routes around 114 BCE, largely through missions and explorations of the Chinese imperial envoy. The Chinese took great interest in

4.
Chinese jade and steatite plaques, in the Scythian -style animal art of the steppes. 4th–3rd century BCE. British Museum.

Tantra
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Tantra is the esoteric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism that co-developed most likely about the middle of 1st millennium CE. The term tantra, in the Indian traditions, also means any systematic broadly applicable text, theory, system, method, instrument, in Hinduism, the tantra tradition is most often associated with its goddess tradition called

1.
Sri Yantra diagram with the Ten Mahavidyas. The triangles represent Shiva and Shakti, the snake represents Spanda and Kundalini.

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Tantric Feast, India, Himachal Pradesh, Nurpur, circa 1790

3.
Making of a Tibetan Sand mandala.

4.
A sadhu smoking cannabis.

Nalanda
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The campus is situated near Chathamangalam,22 kilometres north east of Kozhikode, on the Kozhikode–Mukkam Road. It was established in 1961 and was known as Calicut Regional Engineering College until 2002 and it is one of the National Institutes of Technology established by the Government of India for imparting high standard technical education to s

1.
National Institute of Technology Calicut

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The Administrative Block

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Bhaskara Lecture Hall

Chinese language
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by nat

1.
The Tripitaka Koreana, a Korean collection of the Chinese Buddhist canon

3.
" Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion " by Wang Xizhi, written in semi-cursive style

Abbasid Caliphate
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The Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Abbasid dynasty descended from Muhammads youngest uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and they ruled as caliphs, for most of their period from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after assuming authority over the Muslim empire from the U

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The Black Banner of the Abbasids.

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Coin of the Abbasids, Baghdad, Iraq, 765

3.
Image of the Amir of Khorasan Isma'il ibn Ahmad on the Tajikistani somoni who exercised independent authority from the Abassids

Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referr

1.
The Golden Hall and five-storey pagoda of Hōryū-ji, among the oldest wooden buildings in the world, National Treasures, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site

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Samurai warriors face Mongols, during the Mongol invasions of Japan. The Kamikaze, two storms, are said to have saved Japan from Mongol fleets.

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Samurai could kill a commoner for the slightest insult and were widely feared by the Japanese population. Edo period, 1798

Mantra
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A Mantra is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit believed by practitioners to have psychological and spiritual powers. A mantra may or may not have syntactic structure or literal meaning, the earliest mantras were composed in Vedic Sanskrit by Hindus in India, and are at least 3000 years

1.
In Tibet, many Buddhists carve mantras into rocks as a form of meditation.

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The Om syllable is considered a mantra in its own right in the Vedanta school of Hinduism.

Shingon Buddhism
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For that reason, it is often called Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, or Orthodox Esoteric Buddhism. The word Shingon is the Japanese reading of Chinese, 真言 Zhēnyán True Words, Kūkai returned to Japan as Huiguos lineage- and Dharma-successor. Shingon followers usually refer to Kūkai as Kōbō-Daishi or Odaishi-sama, the name given to him years after his de

1.
The center image of the Mandala of the Womb Realm, featuring the central figure of Mahāvairocana, the five Dhyani Buddhas, and attendant bodhisattvas.

2.
Painting of Kūkai

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The main building of Shinsenen, a Shingon temple in Kyoto founded by Kūkai in 824

Tendai
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Tendai is a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism, a descendant of the Chinese Tiantai or Lotus Sutra school. David W. Philosophically, the Tendai school did not deviate substantially from the beliefs that had created by the Tiantai school in China. However, what Saichō transmitted from China was not exclusively Tiantai, but also included Zen, the e

1.
For the Chinese branch of this school, see Tiantai.

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A priest from the Japanese Tendai school of Buddhism

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A statue of Ennin.

Chinese Buddhist canon
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The Chinese Buddhist Canon refers to the total body of Buddhist literature deemed canonical in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Buddhism. The traditional term for this canon is Dàzàngjīng, which means the Great Treasury of Sūtras, the Chinese Buddhist canon includes Āgama, Vinaya and Abhidharma texts from Early Buddhist schools, as well as

1.
The Tripiṭaka Koreana, an early edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon

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Song Dynasty Chinese printed sutra page

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Tripiṭaka Koreana printed sutra page

Devanagari
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Devanagari, also called Nagari, is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines. The Nagari script has roots in the ancient Brāhmī script family, the Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE and it was fully developed by about the en

1.
A 19th century Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari.

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Devanagiri script (vowels top, consonants bottom) in Chandas font

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Devanagari text from Vayu Purana.

4.
Devanagari देवनागरी

History of Bengal
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The history of Bengal includes modern-day Bangladesh and West Bengal in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, at the apex of the Bay of Bengal and dominated by the fertile Ganges delta. The advancement of civilization in Bengal dates back four millennia, the region was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Gangaridai. The Ganges and the

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Mahasthangarh is the oldest archaeological site in Bangladesh. It dates back to 700 BCE and was the ancient capital of the Pundra Kingdom.

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Asia in 323 BC, the Nanda Empire and Gangaridai Empire in relation to Alexander 's Empire and neighbours.

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Somapura Mahavihara, the greatest Buddhist vihara in the Indian subcontinent, built by Emperor Dharmapala.

Central Asia
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Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. It is also referred to as the -stans as the five countries generally considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix -stan. Central Asias five former Soviet republics are Kazakhstan,

1.
On the southern shore of Issyk Kul lake, Issyk Kul Region.

2.
Central Asia

3.
Uzbek men from Khiva, ca. 1861–1880

4.
Kazakh man on a horse with golden eagle

Stop consonant
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In phonetics, a stop, also known as a plosive or oral occlusive, is a consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the blade or body, lips. The terms stop, occlusive, and plosive are often and inaccurately used interchangeably, linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinctio

Approximant consonant
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Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence and this class of sounds includes lateral app

Fricative consonant
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Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. This turbulent airflow is called frication, a particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a channel, but in addition. English, and are examples of sibilants, the

Voice (phonetics)
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Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterise speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. It can also refer to a classification of sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration. That is the primary use in phonology to describe phonemes or in phonetics to describe phones. At the arti